MC: Now Stu had been fishing for tarpon for a while, at this point, hadn't he? I know he had been seriously pursuing billfish in Central America.

GDLV: Oh yes. He had been fishing for tarpon in the very early '60s. He was a very good guide for tarpon then.

MC: Out of the lower Keys, right?

GDLV: Out of the lower Keys. Mostly out of Big Pine Key. That was where a lot of that fishing was going on. But I actually went down, on my dime, with him and Bernice to billfish in Panama later on that summer.

Then I met Woody Sexton, and I asked Woody if he could take me out the following year. But he was reticent because he didn't want to step on another guides' toes, so I don't believe that Woody fished me in '68. I think I fished with somebody else, but I fished with so many guides in those early days that I can't remember the years or whom I fished with. I know I fished with Cal Cochran, and Harry Snow Jr., and a couple, three more guys down there and didn't really get with Woody until 1969, I believe. And then he and I fished '69, '70, '71, at first as a straight guide-client thing. Which was a big deal, you know — 60 bucks a day!

Then in 1969 Woody drove me over one day to Summerlin Key or somewhere on Cudjoe: “There is someone I want you to meet,” he said. “He's a little bit older than you, and I think you'd enjoy his company and vice versa.” I met Tom [McGuane] that afternoon, and Becky, who'd just had little Thomas maybe six or eight months before. We had a cup of coffee — literally a cup of coffee.

MC: They had a house there?

GDLV: Tom had rented a house. He was, I believe, coming down from Michigan for three or four months of the year, and he was writing. The way we actually got to be friendly was that he was finishing the first article he ever wrote for Sports Illustrated, which was “The Longest Silence,” that wonderful permit article that even now is really quite extraordinary. And oddly enough I wasn't — I'm not — a writer, but I had actually written...

MC: Did you say you are not a writer?

GDLV: Well, I wasn't much of one and I still am not. But you don't say that you are a writer in the same breath with Tom. I'll tell you what I am: I'm a rich guy that writes a book every ten years to try to justify his existence. McGuane and Jim Harrison are real serious writers.

So McGuane read that, and I read his beautiful piece in SI, and I wrote him a note, and he wrote me back a note in which he added, “By the way, would you like to come fish in Montana in October?”But what happened was that in 1969, after the tarpon season, I had written this horrible article for Field & Stream about catching sailfish on a fly rod — which I was already doing then, and so was Gilbert. We'd already been down to Costa Rica, and caught a whole bunch of them on fly. I had also done a lot of sailfishing on fly off of Palm Beach in the winter time. And the article was so badly written that Al [McClane] said, “Guy, look, I can't publish the thing but I have an idea: what I'm going to do is turn your article into a question-and-answer thing.” Which he did. So McGuane read that, and I read his beautiful piece in SI, and I wrote him a note, and he wrote me back a note in which he added, “By the way, would you like to come fish in Montana in October?” And that's how our friendship developed.

I had all the time in the world because I wasn't doing jack, except fishing and hunting. Tom moved permanently to Anne Street in Key West in 1970, and then I would start coming down for tarpon, and we started fishing together.

In fact we fished a lot because we were at one point going to do a book together. He was going to write it, and I was going to take the stills. And a couple of times we had these snits: I would say “Well, you never wrote the f-#@!*-ing thing.” And he would say, “Well your pictures were so God-awful that they didn't inspire me.” What I would do is I would take these poor fish, these bonefish, and I would take a piece of monofilament and pin their noses to the bottom and take pictures. It was just awful. Anyway, we never got any of that done, but we did fish a lot together. Tom and I fished early on for permit, too. Goddamn permit — he and I never caught one together, ever. It was amazing. We didn't have the right flies and didn't know what we were doing back then.

By this time Jim [Harrison] and Russell Chatham had begun coming down in the spring.

MC: And they had known Tom from Montana.

GDLV: They had known Tom a long time. Jim and Tom had gone to Michigan State together, and then Tom met Russell Chatham in California. Tom, as I told you the other day, was definitely the fulcrum for this whole situation. Tom was Jim's friend, and became my friend, and Chatham's friend, and the three of us came down basically to visit him. I always had a boat, and Tom had a boat, and we would not necessarily always fish together, but we kind of worked the fishing out.

I was fishing a lot with Woody through those years, too, and Woody and I became very close friends. One day he said “Can we just fish to fish? You know, if you give me $30 a day, we'll just fish — you fish, I fish, you fish, I fish.” So that's what I did, in '70 or '71. We were on the water together something like 60 or 70 days in a row and from him I learned everything there was to know about poling, which he was extraordinarily good at. And between his knowledge and the other guides I had hired, I got to know the Keys really well.

After I went on to fish with Tom and those guys, I didn't need a guide any more, although Woody and I continued to get out on the water together some. I just settled down, mostly outside of Key West, and would go up to Big Pine a bit, but there was more space below Key West. At the time there were just the Montgomery brothers, Gene and Bob, fishing down there. [Bill] Curtis would come down from Miami every so often. Stu would come down every so often and roar around the flats and make a pain in the ass of himself. But there were, as you say, very few people. There were the do-it-yourselfers — who would have been Tom and me, Norman Duncan on weekends, little John, before he got sick and died — but in all there were very few people fishing. I think Gil came down in '72, with his wife Linda, and moved into Key West and started to guide the following year. It took him about a year or year-and-a-half to learn the flats, then he moved his Deep Water Key clientele over to fish tarpon and permit, and of course he's been there ever since.

MC: I often wish I could set my time travel machine back to the 1890s, when my great- great-grandfather was mayor. I would get in a boat and row up into one of those lower Keys basins and look around. I wonder what I would have seen.

The first time Woody went in, he said, “I promise you, there was between a thousand and fifteen hundred fish in that basin.”GDLV: Well Woody told me that he came down in 1950 with a guy called Adams from north California. They just drove down. They had heard about tarpon and one of the first places they went to — they were staying, again, around the Big Pine area in some crummy crab hole — and they went into Coupon Bight. The first time Woody went in, he said, “I promise you, there was between a thousand and fifteen hundred fish in that basin.” He said it was just solid: as far as you could see there were tarpon rolling and you couldn't go 15 or 20 feet without spooking a fish. And he said that in those days when the tarpon were migrating, the sightings were as high as 700-800 fish a day, in 1950-51. They would fish out of this little rowboat. That's all they had, this aluminum rowboat, and these big old gooney rods that they would use up in the rivers in northern California, and they jumped the shit out of fish.

MC: “Tarpon” came along 20 years later, but I don't imagine the fishing had changed much.

GDLV: Well back to the movie and what happened in 1973. My now brother-in-law, Christian Odasso, who was truly one of the great documentary film makers in Europe, had worked with a man called Francois Reichenbach. Reichenbach was considered at the time to be the number one documentary film maker in all of Europe. These guys come and go but he was as good as they get. Christian, who had apprenticed with him, was three or four years older than me, so he would have been 34 when “Tarpon” was shot, but he had been in the movie business since his early twenties. So he'd had 14 years of movie making where he'd been everything, from gofer to grip to sound to camera, to directing photography and producing. He had an office in Paris and was the consummate filmmaker, one of the very best, with a superb eye. And when we took him out fishing a few times — when he saw the visuals at Key West, and then he saw the fish jump — he said “We should make a movie.”

MC: Did you invite him down with the idea that he might make a movie?

GDLV: No, not at all. He was my sister's boyfriend — they later got married and have been married all these years — but they had been together and I just invited them both down because we were good friends. He went out on the water and that summer just came up with the idea. He said, “You know, this is just too beautiful.”

MC: That was which summer?

GDLV: '73. Then we started to get it all together, and it got very complicated because Christian spoke very little English and he insisted on having a French camera crew come all the way from France to shoot this thing, which made it expensive — although not nearly as expensive as it would be nowadays. He rented some equipment out of Miami, but most everything was brought over from Paris. And he brought with him a very good cameraman, a really good sound man, and an assistant. Christian did either the first or second camera. So there was a crew of three plus Christian, who did a lot of the filming and directed the whole thing. And then of course we had to get an extra boat, so Dink Bruce — I don't know if you know who the famous Dink Bruce is...

MC: Sure, his dad worked for Hemingway.

GDLV: ... the Dinker organized that. We kind of got everything organized, and in March they all came down and there was some reasonable fishing. All the pretty stuff with Harrison and the sunset was shot in March. I may have told you this, but on that day there were hundreds and hundreds of fish in Pearl Basin, and it was flat goddamn calm and they were finning all over the place and we could not get Jim to hook a fish! It was like, “God, Jesus, Jim, please!” Here we've got the sun, the big orange sun, and a thousand fish, just imagine.... But anyway, the fish were tough and it didn't happen.

So the crew stayed about three weeks, and they shot most of the Key West footage. A lot of the on-island stuff was shot in March, because the second time they came was in either late May or early June and that was really all day, all night, on the water. Ninety percent of everything that was shot in Key West — the little train, the hippies and all that — was already in the can, and so now we were just worried that we weren't going to find fish. But of course we did. And we had a really great time. We fished and filmed real hard. We had a house on White Street and you had three or four French guys in there, and myself. And there was no serious naughtiness in those days yet. That came later. Well, there was a little bit — what am I talking about. But nothing really outrageous, I think, because we were so damned tired. But we did have fabulous French meals every night and a lot of wine, and then the next morning we'd be up at 6:30, filming all day.

It was fun because at Antegor Cousteau was editing a movie, Orson Welles was editing a movie, and one other French guy whose name I can't remember but was very well known.Then everybody left. We all went back to France and my brother-in-law got everything developed and into a very good editing house, which is called Antegor. It was fun because at Antegor Cousteau was editing a movie, Orson Welles was editing a movie, and one other French guy whose name I can't remember but was very well known. So we were all there together and spent two-and-a-half months editing this thing. I had lunch with Cousteau a couple of times and met Welles in the studio. In fact Christian, my brother-in-law, had shot a movie called
“F for Fake” which was Orson Welles's last major film. Christian was his director of photography on that. So it was just a lot of fun. We were young, and Paris was Paris— and there was food and wine and the editing of our movie.

Jim Harrison came over, kind of on a lark, and he did a bit of sound-over, but it was more to have some fun. And of course “The Buffett” came over, with Jane, and they stayed with us and looked at the rushes, and when the movie was finished in August or September Jimmy and I went up to Nashville, and he wrote the music for “Tarpon,” which took him less than a day. Then we laid the sound to the film and it was done.

So all of a sudden in September we had this finished product — exactly the same thing that you see now — and with literally nowhere to go with it. Tom had shot “92 in the Shade” that same summer, and when I went down to the keys in October he was within a week or two of wrapping it. We showed “Tarpon” to the gang — we knew so many people in Key West. And it was great fun. We had a ball.

But then of course, what do you do with this thing? And so I spent the next year, year-and-a-half of my life putting on a goddamn suit and tie and trying to peddle the film in New York. And I got to meet all the presidents of every single one of the networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — wound up in their offices, you know. And they had absolutely no interest in it at all. Zero.

MC: What do you attribute that to?

GDLV: I don't know. One, the long-hair hippy thing was not what the people wearing suits in New York were interested in seeing. Fishing out of a little boat, was just, you know, odd. They all said “Oh, what a lovely movie,” “What pretty pictures,” and so forth. But as far as purchasing it or anything like that there was not even the beginning of an interest.

I did get hired by CBS — there was a guy called Bob Wussler who hired me for a couple of jobs that never happened. We were supposed to do one called “The Great Race,” which they are actually doing now. I wrote it, and Jim Harrison and I went up to Canada and we were going to get this whole goddamned thing done and then, as usual, the money never came and I basically told everybody to go $#@!% themselves and never went back. I did shoot two or three movies on my own for Stren and Mercury engines, and stuff like that. I shot one over at Deep Water Cay — actually it was a double movie: a flats movie and an offshore movie all at once. It was great fun, but it was all paying super cheap — I mean $25,000 for a 30-minute movie. And then we made another movie with my brother-in-law for PBS Miami, following Buffet on his 52-foot Cheoy Lee. We went down to the Dry Tortugas and shot it. It was the prettiest movie in the world and PBS in Miami probably still has the damn thing.

MC: What was the subject?

GDLV: Buffett. This was probably '76, a couple of years after “Tarpon.” Christian and Jimmy had become good friends. It was all very cheap. We didn't have the crew from France, we just had two cameras and I brought my skiff down there, so we had a skiff and we had another boat that we stayed on and we just shot Jimmy in the Cheoy Lee and of course everybody was smoking dope. I don't think that made the editing.

MC: Were you fishing?

GDLV: Not really. It was more about the music, and him strumming the guitar in the cabin, something like that. They actually aired the show in Miami in the late '70s two or three times.

MC: When you connected with Jimmy in the early 70s did you know him as a local singer or did you just run into him?

GDLV: What happened with Jimmy was that he came down, I think on a spring vacation, with Jerry Jeff Walker —Jerry Jeff Walker before he became “Mr. Bo Jangles” man.

MC: “Viva Terlingua.”

GDLV: Yes, exactly. And Jimmy knew nobody. The two of those guys came down on a spring vacation. When Jerry Jeff went back to Austin or wherever he lived Jimmy stayed on and met Tom McGuane at a bar or some place. They became good friends and Tom rented him his back room and Jimmy stayed there about a year. Jimmy became part of the group. But he didn't fish at all in those days — zero.

Hunter Thompson was down there an awful lot in the late '70s. And of course Jimmy by then had his place. He was married to Janie, and by that then it was a huge bloody party scene in Key West.During all those years there were a lot of people coming and going. Hunter Thompson was down there an awful lot in the late '70s. And of course Jimmy by then had his place. He was married to Janie, and by that then it was a huge bloody party scene in Key West. When Harrison and Chatham and myself would come down, for anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks, from May until the first week or so in June, it was fishing ... there was some fishing ... but there was also a lot of partying.

MC: And you said that Bill Schaadt had been down there as well.

GDLV: Bill Schaadt had been down there early, early on. He drove down from northern California maybe the second or third time that Russell Chatham visited, which would have put it before the tarpon movie. I think Russie was down there in 1970-71, and so that could have been '72-73. I didn't know Bill very well. He was a very, very serious angler. I was never a serious angler. I mean I liked to fish, but that was his life. I believe he did a lot of billboard painting, that was his profession, but his life was fishing.

MC: Didn't you used to see him dredging the harbor while you guys were partying at the Pier House?

Watch the video trailer for "Tarpon."

Buy "Tarpon" on DVD. GDLV: Absolutely. He had some sort of a funny little rowboat and while we were all having some drinks you'd see him out there, at night, just dredging, and jumping the shit out of tarpon. Like a lot of them. Every 8 or 10 minutes Kaboom!, something would happen. He was just a magnificent fly caster. I'm sure there are people nowadays who are as good or better, and probably hundreds of them, but in our days, Bill Schaadt was something. He was just beyond anything that we could think of. He didn't give a shit, he would cast these lead heads, just get the fly down to the bottom of the ocean and dredge, you know. He caught the hell out of fish.

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